Catherine Armstrong. Landscape and Identity in North America's Southern Colonies from 1660 to 1745.

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Catherine Armstrong's second monograph continues her interest in the history of books and printed materials, which she previously explored through textual representations of England's colonizing efforts in the seventeenth century in Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century (2007). Picking up at the Restoration and focusing principally on the Carolinas and Georgia, Armstrong here shifts her focus to the many ways in which the landscape of these New World colonies was interpreted in print. Defining print in the broadest possible terms, the author promises a study of all types of sources, including (but not limited to) laws, letters, diaries, promotional literature, newspapers, land records, and almanacs. Surveying this wide range of material leads Armstrong to focus on how both colonists and metropolitan commentators linked landscape and identity. She regards the early South as a landscape of struggle where indigenous people, settlers, and the mother country interacted to form specific identities. In particular, Armstrong links such efforts to the development of a unique American identity, and seeks to understand how this identity might be connected to the New World landscape from the earliest moments of southern settlement onward. Her focus is not the actual landscape, but is rather how written and pictorial representations of it provide us with clues as to how these early southerners viewed themselves within the imperial project.